Constructing Reality: The news and you

The largely unexamined assumption many of us make when we pick up our
morning paper is that reality is somewhere out there and the job of the
journalist is to capture it, the way a hunter might truss up a lion, and
deliver it neatly wrapped to our doorstep.

When we discover that's not a realistic assumption, we may adopt the
opposite but equally simplistic view that there's no objective reality out
there at all, but only different people's opinion of it.

But if all the news is subjective, discussion is reduced to shouting heads
yelling past each other on your TV screen. Or the like-minded echoing each
other's prejudices with no net gain in perception.

The most adept propagandists leave the impression that it is only those
unfashionable others who spin the news -- the politicians, the bloggers, the
tabloids, the ever despised Media . . . . In short, the always sinister
They. It is only the trustworthy We who live in a spin-free zone. Kipling said it: "All good people
agree,/And all good people say,/All nice people, like us, are We/And
everyone else is They . . . ."

Think of the faux impartiality of The New York Times or a Lou Dobbs. They
give their prejudices an air of objectivity, even expertise.

NPR is particularly good at it, too, and particularly annoying. The BBC and
Fox News are less irritating because their biases are so blatant.

We keep being told about news coverage that is Fair and Balanced, or
Impartial and Objective. Unfortunately, we tend to use all those terms as
synonyms. They aren't.

Just quoting both sides of a debate and leaving it at that may be balanced,
but it's scarcely fair to the reader. And there's nothing commendable about
being so impartial between truth and falsity that we split the difference
between the two and call it objectivity.

If the press just recites what the politicians say, we run the risk of being
reduced to a bullhorn for their version of reality. Call it the Joe McCarthy
Problem. Merely to retail a demagogue's propaganda and stop there, without
examining it, is to become an accomplice to it.

Happily, the truth has a way of breaking through all our fair-and-balanced
formulas. When a larger reality bumps up against our limited perception of
it, a certain friction is created, a kind of buzz.

Call it cognitive dissonance. Things don't jibe. Some idea we've been
carrying around in our heads for the longest time begins to crumble under
the impact of actual experience. And the scales fall from our eyes.

Think of Winston Smith in George Orwell's "1984." One day, constructing
official reality at his job in the Ministry of Truth, the way a U.S. senator
might change what he said on the floor by the time it appears in the
Congressional Record, poor Winston encounters a telltale photograph of an
event that, according to the party line, didn't occur -- couldn't possibly
have occurred.

Uh oh. Being well-trained in rightthink, Winston throws the incriminating
evidence down the memory hole. That should have been the end of it. But he's
already been subverted. The memory of that photograph grates on his
conflicted mind. His reality has been deconstructed.

I grew up reading the editorials in the old Shreveport Times and knew that
separate-but-equal was the way to go when it came to race relations in the
South.

Then one day, riding the trolley to school, when it came to a stop on
Louisiana Avenue, right across from stately, whites-only Hamilton Terrace
Junior High, the black kids in the back of the bus filed off. (They were
called Negroes back then rather than Black or African-American, but that's a
whole other column -- one about how we struggle with our identities.)

I looked down and saw that the pavement ended where the jagged street they
took -- a muddy road, really -- began. I could easily picture the separate
but unequal school that awaited them at the bottom of the hill. And I was
jarred by what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance.

Two ideas were colliding in my young mind -- the long accepted assumption
and the disturbing new reality. And my mind was changing.

I could never again believe that separate-but-equal schools existed in the
real world. Or that, even if possible, they would be desirable.

That one image of a gravel road crystallized all the other
separate-but-unequal sights I'd grown up seeing but never perceiving. It was
a kind of epiphany.

First we get the static, the confusion, the ideological discontent, all the
symptoms of cognitive dissonance, and only then -- if we're honest -- the
stabbing clarity. We may not like what we suddenly see, but we can no longer
deny it to ourselves.

How perceive reality, how separate wheat from chaff, the party line from the
glimmer of truth?

I tell the journalism students I talk with now and then to stay open to
those shining moments of clarity when they become aware of a certain . . .
cognitive dissonance.